After spending the last seven-plus months lying about the 2020 presidential election, Rudy Giuliani has finally had his law license suspended. It turns out pushing conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud and dedicating your whole life to undermining democracy isn’t something the New York court system will tolerate from its lawyers … for much more than half a year.
Giuliani will be facing further disciplinary proceedings, but the court found him to pose such an “immediate threat of harm to the public” that they’re not allowing him to keep his license while that investigation is going on. This kind of interim suspension is reportedly unusual, and Giuliani’s own lawyers called it “unprecedented.”
The court also wrote that in, addition to this interim suspension, “there is evidence of continuing misconduct, the underlying offense is incredibly serious, and the uncontroverted misconduct in itself will likely result in substantial permanent sanctions at the conclusion of these disciplinary proceedings.”
The 33-page court decision calls Giuliani out for his repeated lies to the public, a thing lawyers are notably not supposed to do!
Interim suspensions, by the way, are rare in New York.
These are the rules in New York that Giuliani is alleged to have violated: pic.twitter.com/9d6nmW2tWN
— Eric Turkewitz (@Turkewitz) June 24, 2021
Giuliani’s best defense was that he wasn’t lying, but he was just given wrong information by a “team member.” However, he couldn’t provide the name of the person he was trying to scapegoat or even the website he says he got the information from. At another point, he said he got information about dead people voting in 2020 from a “blogger”—but the post he cited was an analysis of data from 2017 and 2018.
Did Giuliani knowingly make false statements or is he utterly incompetent?
Or both? pic.twitter.com/Apjy2Ge3R1
— Eric Turkewitz (@Turkewitz) June 24, 2021
After all of Giuliani’s election fraud lies were debunked, he promised to stop spreading them publicly. He did not stop, though, and the decision lists a whole bunch of times Giuliani has continued to publicly lie about voter fraud, mostly on his own radio show, Chat With the Mayor.
As a hilarious side note, after Giuliani was named as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit related to these same lies back in February, the station airing his radio program added a “these views do not represent us” disclaimer before his show—something Giuliani didn’t know about ahead of time, allowing us to hear his outraged reaction in real-time:
Rudy Giuliani lashes out at his employer, WABC, for adding a legal disclaimer to his radio show https://t.co/0tnptUf8Wh pic.twitter.com/1HF4RjyX34
— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 4, 2021
Speaking of that defamation case, Giuliani is expected to appear in federal court in Washington, D.C. today for a hearing. He’s being sued by Dominion Voting Systems over his completely baseless claims that the company was part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to rig the 2020 election.
It’s a busy day for Rudy!
phew good thing rudy is a…wait hold on https://t.co/Fka4wdpc5X
— darth™ (@darth) June 24, 2021
(via New York Times, image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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